which exceeds anything you can picture to yourself by
the utmost stretch of your imagination. So far we have had this hotel
nearly to ourselves. It is a large square house, standing on a bold
height, with overhanging eaves like a Swiss cottage, and a wide handsome
gallery outside every story. These colonnades make it look so very
light, that it has exactly the appearance of a house built with a pack
of cards; and I live in bodily terror lest any man should venture to
step out of a little observatory on the roof, and crush the whole
structure with one stamp of his foot.

Our sitting-room (which is large and low like a nursery) is on the
second floor, and is so close to the Falls that the windows are always
wet and dim with spray. Two bedrooms open out of it--one our own; one
Anne's. The secretary slumbers near at hand, but without these sacred
precincts. From the three chambers, or any part of them, you can see the
Falls rolling and tumbling, and roaring and leaping, all day long, with
bright rainbows making fiery arches down a hundred feet below us. When
the sun is on them, they shine and glow like molten gold. When the day
is gloomy, the water falls like snow, or sometimes it seems to crumble
away like the face of a great chalk cliff, or sometimes again to roll
along the front of the rock like white smoke. But it all seems gay or
gloomy, dark or light, by sun or moon. From the bottom of both Falls,
there is always rising up a solemn ghostly cloud, which hides the
boiling cauldron from human sight, and makes it in its mystery a hundred
times more grand than if you could see all the secrets that lie hidden
in its tremendous depth. One Fall is as close to us as York Gate is to
No. 1, Devonshire Terrace. The other (the great Horse-shoe Fall) may be,
perhaps, about half as far off as "Creedy's."[3] One circumstance in
connection with them is, in all the accounts, greatly exaggerated--I
mean the noise. Last night was perfectly still. Kate and I could just
hear them, at the quiet time of sunset, a mile off. Whereas, believing
the statements I had heard I began putting my ear to the ground, like a
savage or a bandit in a ballet, thirty miles off, when we were coming
here from Buffalo.

I was delighted to receive your famous letter, and to read your account
of our darlings, whom we long to see with an intensity it is impossible
to shadow forth, ever so faintly. I do believe, though I say it as
shouldn't, that they are good 'un